To Greet the Day
by Laryna6
Summary: The idealistic 70s have given way to the materialistic 80s and an unfortunate number of movies about evil robots. Dr. Light has built a successful company. The brilliant Dr. Wily still refuses to join the adult world, forget the working one. Thomas' doctoral project continues to develop, but Blues may not be the only AI on Earth.
1. Early Days

_This is something of a counter-fic to 'Mornings Should Be Outlawed,' which was a pre-series fic with my pre-Mega Man Gigamix The Atoner version of Dr. Light. _

_Then Hitoshi Ariga's version of Dr. Light's backstory and motivations was so ungodly appropriate and added _so much_ to the overall Mega Man mythos that I just tossed out my old headcanon._

_As many have pointed out, young Dr. Wily was a _fox_. _

_I've been intending to do a grad school era fic, the two of them working together on the sadbot that was later upgraded into Blues (possibly with another character getting turned on early…), but I found myself writing this in a tumblr post._

_This fic will go slightly AU in later chapters due to something happening earlier than per canon because it seemed like an interesting thing to have happen (the characters share a hobby and should get to interact), and it's not going to get angsty, no worries. _

* * *

When he walked into the lab the next morning, there was a custom power receiver on his desk. On top of sketched schematics! He'd have to go over them to translate them into normal-people, or at least normal-engineer, but he wouldn't have to take apart the device to try to figure out how it was made and make his own, he could get it set up and start testing right away.

As soon as he got some breakfast into his... roommate? Housemate? Lab partner?

Albert was asleep in the lab again. At least it was on the couch in the anteroom where they kept Blues, where he slept when he'd made a decision to go to sleep to remember something or get ideas, instead of still on his workchair in the main area, head pillowed on his arms as they rested on the desk on top of tools and pieces.

Thomas really didn't want to know when he'd fallen asleep. At least the new lab he'd designed had windows, even if he was worried about Blues' security. It was the only way to get Albert to get any sun.

He nudged Albert's side with his knee. When he blinked awake, he told him, "I have a bowl of fruit here. If you want actual breakfast, it's in the breakfast room." It was alright to bring food into this room, but if Albert was going to work on chip assembly or something else today, good luck trying to get food into him. They couldn't afford crumbs in the main lab – it was alright to eat in this drafting and study area by design, because eating was a social activity and Thomas wanted Blues to be included in that and Albert to eat, period.

"Why do you keep tempting me to turn off the sun?" Albert asked, rubbing his eyes before stretching. "You have a live-in maid now: can't she do room service?"

"When are you ever in your room?" he wondered, rolling his eyes as he put the bowl on Albert's worktable. There was some chance he'd see it there.

"Lab service," Albert said with an offhand wave, because in Albert's mind of _course_that was what he meant. The guest room Thomas had given him was just storage space, for things he'd collected on his travels that didn't merit lab shelf space. "I'm sure you're paying her enough."

"Speaking of which..." Thomas started to say, and regretted it as soon as he had.

"Not this again," Albert said, rolling his eyes as he got up. "I'm the one who should be paying you rent. Room, board," even if normally he didn't eat three meals a day, "all the lab equipment I want... what would I spend a salary on? And I've got spending money from the little toys you had your lawyers patent for me. I just took off to spend two months in Kyoto. What more do I need?"

Health insurance, Thomas didn't say. A retirement plan. The benefits that would come from being an actual employee of Light Labs. Yes, Albert and job were words that didn't belong in the same sentence, but Albert traveled, and even if his lack of faith in human nature meant meant he was quicker on the uptake about expected bribes than Thomas would ever be, despite Albert's general complete lack of interest in reading other people or complying with their expectations, Thomas kept expecting to get a call saying Albert had offended the wrong person and Thomas was going to need to bail him out, even if that hadn't happened since... about half a year after they met.

Having a maid meant that now clothes got mended and appeared in drawers - Albert didn't pay enough attention to anything but lab coats to notice he mysteriously had clothing that wasn't falling apart, unless he was dressing to intimidate and he hadn't really had reason to do that since grad school.

"I'm thinking of buying another house in Japan," was what he said instead. Building would be more accurate, given the need for labs. "I'm spending enough time there, and they're very interested in robotics as well as solar technology."

The solar generator that made Light Labs a multi-million dollar company. He had a few other patents, but if all went well, that one alone would give him the money to fund his robotics research. Make sure he had the time to get it _right_, instead of having to make promises to who-knew-who in order to get the funding he needed.

Nothing compared to Albert's fusion, of course, but Albert said (claimed?) it wouldn't work without a sapient robot, and so far there was only one of those in the world.

"What's bothering you now?" Albert asked, as if Thomas' refusal to have his baby examined and possibly dissected so the world could have free unlimited energy (at the cost of sentient AI with no impulse control being spread around and becoming very unhappy if no one kept them company, true) and his friend could be hailed as the inventor of fusion wasn't anything worth thinking about at all.

"Do you know when Blues went into sleep mode?" Dr. Light asked. If it wasn't that long ago, he didn't want to wake him up by putting music on. If there was someone in the lab, Blues wanted to stay awake to watch them and see if they'd pet him or play music for him, but he needed plenty of hibernation time.

Albert raised an eyebrow.

"Never mind." Thomas chuckled. Right. Albert, keep track of time?

There was a soft little peep, and Thomas brightened. So Blues _was_learning to recognize his name? He went over to his desk and patted the little dear on the head. "Let me get put on a record for you," he said.

His little robot was humming and making sounds, trying to learn how to sing along, so of course Thomas lost track of time until Albert tapped him on the shoulder.

He turned, and blinked down at the plate. Eggs and bacon on toast, a makeshift sandwich. "I fled in case you started to sing," Albert explained, taking his own plate with the remains of a sandwich and a few extra strips of bacon back to his table.

Albert had left the lab, actually had a real breakfast? Perhaps he actually had gotten a decent night's sleep. The fact he'd remembered to bring something for Thomas wasn't unusual - Albert was the one to bring food to the lab to share first, when Thomas was too worried about crumbs. That was how they'd ended up with a cupboard of exotic candy bars and bagged snacks from around the world.

"Careful not to sing," Albert reminded him, thankfully not noticing Thomas' surprise. "You don't want to traumatize him and make him hate music, do you?"

"Perish the thought," he murmured, smiling first at Albert and then down at Blues.

His robot quite deliberately blinked at him, a hopeful 'Pay attention to me?' and of course he had to work on his most important project until Albert's shoe hit the back of his head.

"No singing," Albert insisted half-jokingly, hefting his other shoe in case more persuasion is needed. "I finished your beamed power receiver, now I want to get back to my projects without being distracted by your caterwauling."

"Sorry," Thomas said, looking sheepish. "Oh," he remembered. "Thank you for the receiver."

Albert waved it off.

Thomas glanced at Blues.

"Your dad has to get back to work so he can put electrons on the table," Albert said, looking at Blues.

Thomas coughed, a little embarrassed. "At least I'm a stay-at-home father most days?" Even if he had a meeting with the head of the patent application staff later.

"And you're practicing to be a mother hen. Don't think I haven't noticed you fussing over me," Albert said. "Don't spoil him."

"Getting to spend time with their parents isn't spoiling a child," Thomas said firmly, and then had to suppress a wince, thinking of how Albert never mentioned his parents.

* * *

Mr. Ito looked up from the schematics. "You realize this is why everyone thinks he's your lab assistant, right?"

Thomas chuckled. "Shouldn't they think I'm his secretary?"

"He's not the one with a multi-million dollar energy company," his patent lawyer pointed out. "He acts like it's still the seventies." Laid-back, refusing to wear a suit.

Thomas had preferred the seventies, but here they were in the Eighties, age of materialism. At least the expansion of Japan's economy and their interest in electronics meant moving more operations over there was an acceptable option. Given all he'd heard about the military-industrial complex, he'd rather be off American soil when he revealed that he had robots with the intelligence (and hopefully by that point physical abilities) necessary to be effective warbots and wasn't going to let anyone, even his own country, use them for the purpose of war.

For sapient robots to be introduced to the world not as people but as _things _that killed people…

Japan's constitution made it illegal for them to attack other countries. This was still future contingency planning, best viewed as mainly theoretical. The world had changed so much in less than ten years: who knew what it would look like by the time Blues was ready to be upgraded and Thomas had finished developing the necessary technology?

"You publish your own work," Mr. Ito added when his boss didn't respond. "Every time anyone gets schematics or papers about his research, you're the one who drew them, or wrote them. It's a fair assumption that you're doing at least part of the work and only giving him full credit because everyone knows that you're nice like that."

Access to cheap energy technology made it fairly easy to be a philanthropist. Dr. Light's main goal was ensuring that robotics would help the world, but he did have other projects. Rather like how a great deal of the technology NASA developed for space missions turned out to have other, major, beneficial applications.

"Well, if _you _want to try to interpret and translate what he does write down…" Dr. Light offered.

Mr. Ito laughed. "No way, man. I like to think I'm fairly good at what I need to know to do my job," about science and technical writing, "but I'm not that good. It works out anyway, doesn't it? Otherwise, given how many of the solar generator components he's designed, you'd have people trying to hire him away."

"Albert and job do not belong in the same sentence," Thomas said.

"That sounds like something you've said before."

"I first heard it from one of the undergraduates. We went to a research university for our doctorates, but even so Albert wasn't exactly the person you wanted to be teaching your lab section."

"Yeah, I can see that," Mr. Ito said. "Having seen a few of his drafts." Ones Dr. Light had passed on to him when Mr. Ito said that for legal purposes, he really _should _claim the correct percentage of credit for the inventions he was submitting, especially since leaving it in his old school friend's name meant Light Labs might end up having to pay punitive fees for several key generator upgrades, ones that made Dr. Light's solar far more compact and/or robust, if he and Dr. Wily had an argument or the scientist was seduced away by another company in the name of industrial espionage, even if they didn't understand the true value of Dr. Wily's brain.

"I still don't like Albert not getting the proper credit in the scientific community, but there's only so much I can do," to represent him, when Albert had no interest in speaking the jargon and schmoozing any more than necessary to graduate.

"You do realize that companies do tend to have some percent ownership of research people do in their labs, even if Albert isn't on the record as your employee?" Mr. Ito reminded him. "If Light Labs ever goes public, trying to get control over his patents in self-defense as well as denying them to competitors is an obvious move, and without your backing he doesn't have the resources for that kind of legal battle. Putting your name on there would reassure stockholders and make it clear that those patents aren't easy targets." They'd be picking a fight with Dr. Light, father of the green energy revolution, as well as some eccentric nobody.

"If I can't get him to accept a salary, then he needs to have income that's under his own name instead of mine."

"You could buy some percentage of the intellectual rights off him."

"He invents me these things – the ones of use to Light Labs – as his way of paying rent, or thanking me for letting him use my lab and resources. He'd let me take full credit for legal purposes if I said that was a good idea, but I wouldn't be able to get him to accept payment for gifts."

Mr. Ito looked incredulous. He'd asked awhile ago if Albert had any idea of Dr. Light's net worth, and yes, it wasn't as though Albert didn't know how much lab equipment and computers cost – it was much of why he'd built his own computing power and more exotic devices back in grad school, experience which came in handy when he decided to help Dr. Light build Blues. Thomas belatedly realizing that he really should get Albert's chips patented for him since he wasn't going to do it himself had advanced the field by several years even almost eight years after Albert created those chip designs for Blues. Thomas hadn't quite grasped how spoiled he was, getting to use Albert's technology for his inventions, until he looked into getting his solar power generators manufactured and there was nothing on the market with the specs he'd taken for granted when he designed them.

"He'd get swindled. They'd eat him alive," Mr. Ito said finally. "Should I explain to him how this works?" Mr. Ito was quite willing to take the time, especially when Dr. Light would insist on Mr. Ito billing him for it. He understood the value of a professional's, of anyone's time and assistance, even if other people would rather not pay back the value they received.

That was something he'd have to think about before bringing his robot masters into the world as well. He wanted them to learn to value people, to understand why they should help them, but the kind of people who refused to pay the people who made the food they needed in order to live enough to live on themselves…

Well, that was one of the advantages of black boxing Blues. No one was going to be able to create robot masters without a copy of programming that Dr. Light was going to lock down any way he could. If other people couldn't figure out how robot master sapience and willingness (ability!) to obey humans and solve problems worked, then they couldn't reproduce it through programs they'd written themselves and create knock-offs just different enough they couldn't be sued for it.

Everyone he'd known back in grad school knew that Proto Man was a test unit for robots with emotions, but Dr. Light had let them think that it was more of a toy or a pet. When Dr. Light revealed more robot masters to the world, he wouldn't reveal that Blues was the source of their code, that robot masters weren't and _couldn't _be made quickly from scratch, not without copying from a development unit like Blues. If no one realized that it took years of lead time to create something like Blues, then they wouldn't be able to start their own soon enough to have marketable results for decades.

If he could create and hold on to a monopoly long enough, so people had to pay for the time and effort of robot masters instead of letting them be bought and sold, if… Well, for now this was still al theoretical, but he was going to need to understand intellectual property laws in order to keep them from being used against robot masters. Having money of his own instead of working on someone else's contract meant he could afford lobbyists, public relations, professionals like Mr. Ito.

Of course this was something he should spend years working on. This was the future of his children (and the human race) he was talking about. _His _parents spent a decade and a half saving money away for their son's college education. For Blues' sake, he couldn't rush these things any more than he could rush the technical side.

"I'll see if I can make him sit still for that," Dr. Light responded. If he pointed out that it was research, studying a system, for Blues' sake… It wasn't as though Dr. Wily hadn't gamed the school administration and bylaws to get away with things without actually being expelled (from the labs) back when they were roommates.

* * *

_Roll compares the Noise Crush to Dr. LIght's singing voice. Sad for someone who clearly values music._


	2. Finders Keepers

"Up for ping-pong?" Albert asked when he got back, looking up from a notebook full of equations. Ah, so he _had _gotten a full-night's sleep then: whatever he was working on must have gotten to the point where even Albert needed to do some serious brainstorming. Albert wasn't interested in exercising for the sake of his health, but pool was a means of acquiring quick cash and table tennis was a way to do something physical while his subconscious worked on a problem.

Thomas glanced over at Blues. "And you say that I'm spoiling him," he said when he saw that Albert had pulled Blues' base onto the little cart they used to move him from place to place.

Thomas took Blues to his room overnight when the maid came in to clean the lab once a week. She'd been vetted thoroughly by his company's people for the sake of avoiding industrial espionage, but even if it was safe to leave Blues among strangers when he was built, he was further along now. More hints of a developing personality that someone might notice, especially when Blues would be interested in the new stimulus, the potential new friend, and start his little processor working on how to get her attention so she would pat him on the head and talk to him.

"There are some concepts he needs to have," Albert reminded him as the two of them moved the cart into the game room. "I'm not certain that he's fully grasped that when we're not there it's because we're going somewhere else, so giving him additional evidence that there are other places and we go to them when we're not in the lab is a good idea now that I'm fairly close to certain he's developed attachment to individuals. Humans used to believe that the moon died and was reborn just because they couldn't see it for a few nights," he said, rolling his eyes. "Object permanence is going to be important if we don't want him working on how to keep us from leaving the room." Add the desire to make sure they weren't going away in a way that meant they might never come back to the already-developed emotion of loneliness? "Also, if you're introducing him to your hobby, I'm going to see if I can get him interested in playing table tennis with me."

Blues didn't have arms yet, or the flexibility, range of motion and movement programming necessary to actually play, but he would eventually, or that was the plan.

"I've gotten in the habit of immediately giving him some kind of positive reinforcement when I get back if I have to leave him alone in the lab." Like during Albert's trips. "I would like to find someone else reliable to babysit, but…" the risk in exposing Blues' existence to the world?

"Not when that Terminator movie just came out," Albert said, annoyed. "I might have something," he said after a moment, looking up at the ceiling and then at Thomas. For a moment there was a hard light in his eyes, an assessing look – because when Albert judged people, he was used to ending up disappointed, if not contemptuous. Most people he ignored with varying degrees of rudeness or distracted benevolence depending on his mood, but when someone managed to get his attention? It was flattering to see Albert's gaze soften and then turn speculative, back to whatever solution he was contemplating, because he'd found Thomas worthy. "But I'm not working on it in a lab with windows. Or exterior walls, to be on the safe side," he added. "How soon were you thinking of buying a place in Japan, and are you willing to build a lab to my specs?"

"Is this something hazardous?" Thomas asked. Was Albert proposing something involving Blues that was actively dangerous?

"Probably not, but definitely illegal. Actual federal offense illegal, not just 'they'll haul you away and stick you in a military lab somewhere,' like your son. I'll have to smuggle it out of the country and into Japan, but _that's _doable."

"Smuggle what, exactly?"

Albert smirked. "Blues' new friend."

* * *

"This is… when did you start building a robot?" Dr. Light asked, leaning forward when Albert's crowbar finally popped open the crate inside the box.

"I didn't build him. I found him the summer before sixth grade," Albert said reminiscently. "I had an idea about dimensions that implied a couple of things would be true if it was true, so I built a detector and found two sources of certain energy patterns – one out in space and one out in Wyoming. I bribed the staff and took a road trip. I considered fixing him up so he could walk back to my place – that way I wouldn't have had to find a way to transport him – but just in case there was anyone still alive in there I didn't want to start messing around with alien technology until I understood more about… a few different things. Since Blues let me confirm that my theory about those energies was correct," something to do with fusion, then, and how Albert's generator got the energy required to smash two nuclei together to begin with, "I've been thinking of starting to repair him. Examining his construction has already given me a few ideas, and obviously he'll need to pass for human – I'm not repairing someone just so they can haul him off and dissect him. I can use that experience when it's time to upgrade Blues."

"Someone else had already built a robot like this and started experimenting with your fusion principles when you were_ how _old? They would have had to invent even more technology from scratch than we did," to create Blues. There were a lot of advances in computer technology between 1960 and when the two of them were in grad school working on Blues. Someone building a robot, someone with the same insight Albert had back then? There were _two _of Albert?

"He's an alien," Albert explained. "I checked the metal composition. Not even from this solar system."

"An… alien." He found an alien robot, clearly built for combat if Dr. Light was any judge of engineering and design, and instead of turning it into the authorities brought it home with him intending to see if he could fix it up? "Oh, _Albert_." Honestly, that was exactly what he would do.

"I found him, so he's mine. I wasn't going to let the government _dissect _him. The way they treat anyone who's a little different…" Albert glowered. "If humans can't get a fair chance, they weren't going to give one to an alien."

"So you wanted a lab with no exterior walls so people couldn't look in and see what you were working on." Dr. Light nodded. "How much did discovering him have to do with you helping me build Blues?"

"You had the right idea about robots, so there was a non-zero chance you might be trustworthy, and it would be good experience. I was thinking about building this one a friend, but if I can get the body hooked in again, get him to wake up, then it might be good for Blues to meet another robot."

"Hooked in again?" Dr. Light asked. "Do you really think you can what, get it started up again? Are their chips, or equivalents that robust?" Then there were compatibility problems! Albert was Albert, but even getting the body to work should take at least a decade, forget trying to interface with the original personality, if anything was left of it.

"Remember I told you that I was thinking of how to bypass the speed of light when I first thought of the principle that lets fusion work?" Albert asked him. "Anyway, he's still radiating that pattern, and that energy can't be tapped without a consciousness. There's no consciousness presently in that body, so the consciousness must be stored outside the body. Since you've let me examine Blues' interface with his fusion generator, I ought to be able to connect chips to the interface between this guy and the energy tap. Then it's just a matter of remodeling the body and doing some programming to make sure the chips channel and translate this guy's personality instead of generating a new one like Blues."

"Albert… Blues isn't dangerous, but what if this person's creators were developing AI for _combat?" _He and Albert had spent a lot of afternoons discussing what would stem from various approaches to the formative events AI experienced and what could go wrong, what Thomas was trying to prevent by creating Blues first.

"It'll take awhile after startup for his programming and soul to really interface with the systems based on yours I'll be using," Albert told him. "We'll have time to spot the warning signs before he'd be smart enough to do anything to keep me from shutting him down."

"I'll take your word for it," Thomas said, because this was Albert and he wasn't going to stop someone from trying to save a life. The robot was… mangled. If there was some thread of life left in it, how long until that snapped, entropy being what it was? The robot clearly wasn't capable of repairing itself, so at some point it would no longer be able to keep itself alive.

"You do that," Albert said, somewhere between flippantly and absently, focused on the alien robot now.

Thomas wasn't quite sure if that was a suggestion or a compliment. Maybe both. "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help, any more parts or equipment you need?" Besides the shopping list Albert had already given him for this lab.

"I'll need a copy of Blues' alpha build, and I'll need to take a look at what he's running now so I can get a look at the intersection between the base configuration programming you set up and an actual personality."

Ah, for better data on how to use it to host an alien soul?

Dr. Light wouldn't give just anyone access to Blues' programs, especially not at this stage, when it would probably still be possible for someone, _especially _Albert, to decipher the ones beginning to make up his core. It would endanger Blues, endanger robots as yet unmade.

The way Dr. Wily wouldn't let just anyone know about his alien.

"What did you mean by radiating a pattern?" Dr. Light asked him. "Is it sending an SOS?" He liked the _Sector General _series, and they made a good point; trying to save the life of the member of an alien race during a first contact would make a far better impression than finishing them off and dissecting them. On the other hand, Albert had already preserved this robot's life by hiding them, and if it was possible that people who actually knew how to repair this kind of damage were already on their way, then if this robot's life wasn't in immediate danger it might be a better idea to hold off. Was that part of why Albert hadn't immediately started trying to fix the alien robot when he found it?

Albert shook his head, getting a measuring tape out of his pocket now that he had the casing open. "It's the same pattern as my fusion generator. One of the simpler ones possible, which is why I rigged my detector to look for it. Even if they were looking for him, if there are other species out there that invented my fusion technology it'd be trying to find a needle in space. If there were some organization out there keeping an eye out for fusion technology on developing worlds, they'd have found him thousands of years before I did."

"Perhaps it's taking them awhile to get here?" If FTL wasn't possible.

"Nope," Albert said smugly, putting his clipboard on one of the corners of the box so he could note down the last six measurements. "But I'm going to have to wait to test _that _out until Blues is sapient. Unless I can get this one fixed up and have him run the tests for me. Bypassing the lightspeed barrier is like turning lead into gold."

Which was impossible… using chemistry. But once nuclear physics was discovered? The only barrier to making alchemy's goal a reality was the reality of how much it would cost to make that gold.

Wait a minute. "If he arrived on our planet thousands of years ago, then why wasn't he buried?" Some system keeping him near the surface so he could be found?

"Dynamite… Well, fireworks," Albert corrected himself. "It was less trouble to buy those. I put together shaped charges. And a jackhammer," he conceded, sounding disappointed in himself. "The books I could find weren't thorough enough and I didn't want to spend more time with test charges than I already had, so once I got close enough it was a lot faster to just do it the hard way instead of trying to get better precision. I wanted to get home before… but it turned out that I shouldn't have bothered."

Thomas could have asked, but Albert's opinion of his childhood (outside of the experiments he'd done in the guest house he'd converted into a lab) was the same as Sherlock Holmes' opinion of orbital mechanics: utterly irrelevant and neurons spent storing that information were wasted neurons.

"I'll work on building the new body first," Albert told him. "That'll kill two birds with one stone: he'll let me beta test robotics designs." Blues wouldn't need to pass for human for a long time, but the two of them were going to need to invent a lot of things to make it possible. "Speaking of which, even if we don't want him to look human yet, I should be able to build Blues a much smaller – and much lighter – body. That'll make him more portable, for one thing."

"Yes, that's a good idea. Once he's been removed from it, I can program his old body to light up the way it did back in the lab at college."

"Hide that it evolved, and make it look as though the new robot is 2.0 instead of transplanting the same AI into a bigger processor." Albert grinned. "If you tell people that the 'new' one is a prototype pet robot, once you teach Blues how to behave you could even take him out in public."

"I'd considered that," Dr. Light admitted, "but I'd rather he stay in a humanoid body. Yes," he admitted when Albert stared at him. "His original body isn't very humanoid, but there were weight and volume constraints."

"Then build the pet body and hook it up to him so he can remote control it," Albert suggested. "If you want directing other robots to be part of the base instincts, he should start doing it as soon as possible in his formative years."

"That's one of the things I wanted the power receiver for," Dr. Light told him. "At first he'll be using wired connections, but I'm concerned about sensory overload. You remember what happened when Mike rigged up those kaleidoscopes." In his defense, he'd thought that it would be fun input for a pattern-finding machine, much better than just sitting there in the lab overnight, but it took a few days before Blues got hungry enough for input to stop dumping visual data and start analyzing it again. "I want data links to other units to be the same as any other sense for them, but Blues' introduction to them needs to be a positive experience, not something traumatic."

"Your singing voice is one thing, but it won't help robot masters to associate connecting to other robots with something as painful as data overload," Albert agreed. "Not when that's so important to what you're trying to do. You're the one who knows Blues' status best: what do you want to try first? New body, or wired connection to a simple robot?"

"The connection to a simple robot, definitely. I'd rather he get used to the concept of receiving data from something with a different body before he finds _himself _in a different body. I'm going to leave a very simple processor, one that can at least give him visual data, in the old body and leave him connected to it awhile before cutting that connection fully. I may stretch this out over a year, so he has plenty of time to incorporate the concepts without being scared. Fortunately, he likes new things."

Albert frowned. "He doesn't," he said. "Maybe it's his personality developing, maybe he's getting better at thinking about change without melting down, but even though you've been trying to give him mental stimulation, he may be chronically data-starved." He put down the tape measure. "I'm going to get on building him a simple little robot to remote control."

Dr. Light would have to program it, once he was done. It might not occur to Blues that he could move it, but if Dr. Light built another controller so Blues could see it moving in response to certain signals? "I've been varying what's played in the lab overnight as much as I can," new music, whalesong, city sounds, "but if he's already built himself a dedicated system for analyzing music?" That would be progress, that was something Blues needed to learn how to do, and once he built one such system he could apply it to understand other things, but it also meant that music wasn't as much work to analyze anymore and Blues was going to need other sources of data to work on.

_Animals _could grow ill from lack of mental simulation: infants could have their IQs permanently lowered… Dr. Light's face blanched. If getting better at learning caused Blues to suffer data-starvation, then that might teach him that it was a _bad _thing to grow smarter. "I think I need to pick up the pace," he said. "Think of it like skiing."

"Skiing?" Albert wondered.

"If you're not falling, you're not trying. I don't like causing him data overload, but data overload is _normal _for young children. Even adults can get data overload, we're just better at avoiding it, because we've learned techniques for avoiding getting hit with more than we can handle. Blues is going to need to learn how to avoid getting overwhelmed and how to handle it and regain control when he is overwhelmed at some point. It might even be best to do it now. It's perfectly normal for a toddler to throw a tantrum, and no one will get hurt, but if an adult decides to react to loss of control with anger because they failed to learn better when they should have, they can hurt people."

"You and your child psychology books." Albert looked like he'd _like _to argue, but really couldn't. "I should read up on the development of computers that are learning how to think, I just can't stand how much of it is flat-out _wrong._ Anyway, you're the expert on self-control here. I _tried _to learn how to meditate," during Albert's college quest to look into everything people did to create controllable effects on their own brains, including mind-altering substances. Albert was just incapable of clearing his mind, of stopping that whirl of thoughts for even a moment.


	3. New Arrival

The first trial involved a robot with a very simple little bit of programming covered in a round, golden helmet, with no corners to dent people's shins. Thomas hooked up a wired controller to it, and let Blues see it marching around before putting the controller on top of his head, and then inserting the wire into one of the ports he'd rigged up awhile ago to replace the ports he and Albert had originally built in, which really only worked with the stuff Albert was using that year. There was trying to keep their curious fellows from getting into Blues and taking a look, and then there was letting Blues access the outside world someday.

The little robot didn't sit there for more than a minute before rocking on its heels, and then beginning to replicate some of the patterns Dr. Light had it walk in. He'd programmed in some of those patterns, so it would execute them in response to simple inputs before Blues got the hang of sending more complicated instructions.

Dr. Light clapped, a simple patterned sound, and switched the music to one of Blues' preferred songs. "If I can find a music player with large buttons, and design the next robot to press them?" he said happily.

"Radio."

Thomas paused. "Radio?"

"New content," Albert reminded him. "People talking to each other who aren't us."

"Well… it's not television," inflicting random video _and _audio on Blues, while he was also experimenting with motion? "I'm still concerned-"

Bong.

The robot's helmet hit the metal cabinet under Blues' body.

Bong. Bong. Bong.

Albert turned to look at Thomas and his jaw dropped. "You gave him the power to make noise." When _Albert _wanted to ask what the heck you were _thinking?!_

"He figured it out so quickly! He must have seen that two things striking each other could produce sound, well, I already verified that, but he's testing his observational data personally!"

"You _knew _the first thing he would try to do once he realized he could move a robot was this," Albert said, as the bonging continued, "And you shaped that helmet so it would _sound pretty_? He's going to keep this up until you give him another toy-" His hand caught what Thomas tossed at him. "Well," he admitted, letting out a breath as he calmed down. "At least you did think ahead." Earplugs. "I'm going to be in the other lab." Albert wasn't a big fan of having music on while he worked: he put up with it less because of Thomas than because of Blues' need for mental stimulation. Random clanging was a little much, even if it wasn't clanging.

Blues started making sounds, trying to match the bonging, and this was one of those times that Thomas really, _really _wished that it was safe to make home movies.

* * *

"Why a ninja?" Thomas wondered, looking at the new frame Albert built to hold certain parts from the alien robot's body.

"Because ninja are _quiet_." So hopefully he would be a good influence on Blues.

"I'm sorry," Thomas apologized for the third time this week. "I don't understand why it's taking him so long to understand the importance of negative space," even if he was trying to construct patterns instead of just make noise as rapidly as possible from the beginning.

"Too much time with too little mental stimulation," Albert said, and scowled. "I should have caught it sooner."

"I don't want to punish him for being creative and experimenting," that would be completely counterproductive, "but I don't know how to incentivize him to, well, it's not that we _don't _want him to make noise." They wanted him to learn to talk eventually.

"Batteries."

"In the robots?"

"Or at least a limited amount of power they can draw from the lab systems every day."

"Yes, that would help, and the radio might help keep him from getting bored when he can't use the robot."

* * *

The change to the next day for the robot power meter was midnight, and it took several months for Blues to acquire enough impulse control to not blow his power budget immediately, but instead wait until Dr. Light was there and would pat him on the head and talk to him again after watching his show.

Linking him to a robotic pointer that could turn the radio on and off (although the doctors could unplug it if it got too annoying) and adjust the station became the next problem. Blues developed a search pattern for all the music stations, but if there wasn't anything new he'd zoom in on the most overdramatic talk show or poorly acted drama he could find.

"Why are you surprised?" Albert asked, getting more earplugs.

It wasn't as though Blues knew what they were saying, so he couldn't really understand how trashy these programs were, but "He has good taste in music?"

"Taste has nothing to do with it," Albert said. "Tone of voice."

"_Oh_," Thomas realized thankfully. "He already knows what a rising inflection means." A question.

"And he knows when you're doting on him, and what kind of sound gets you over there right away when he's overheating. He's picking out the programs that emphasize the part of the signal that he can partially understand."

"Since he has something of a Rosetta stone. Perhaps it's a good thing we're in Japan and this isn't English-language radio," Thomas realized. "He knows _some _words, from us, but practice analyzing and identifying emotions instead of trying to watch both tone of voice and words at once is a good thing, I think. He's not up to actually decrypting any languages yet, so it'll be good for him to work on the part I'm sure that he _can_ do."

"I can't believe I'm the one who caught that," Albert mused. "You're the one who pays attention to it. To people."

"I was thinking like a parent," Thomas admitted. "The content on those programs… He can't understand it, but it's writing to permanent memory!" Eventually he would know what they were saying!

Albert laughed. "Good thing I'm almost ready to turn on his new toy, then."

"Really?"

"There's adaptive movement programming that's set up to handle different gravities, body types and masses, so that's not a problem. What would be a problem is that its adaptive learning system is _only _for combat-related applications. If it's given a priority outside a very narrow list, it'll shut down. They only gave their robots the ability to think about a _narrow _range of topics, and military operations require initiative at the tactical level, as the Vietnam War proved for anyone willing to look at it. Unless a group of robots like this had a massive technical advantage, they wouldn't have a prayer of winning a fight without an officer from whatever species built them on the ground. They need to have targets and tactics assigned outside of a narrow list. We're not inside the acceptable targeting criteria," he added.

Therefore, Albert continued, "If it decided to attack us, it would have to make that decision using your programming, and fat chance of that. I already have a program set up to rapidly teach a system like Blues all human languages – it helps that there are a lot fewer kinds of language than people think, so I have to wonder if learning languages isn't actually instinctive, and if so I think that what I pulled together isn't that different from how the brain does it. Except better," of course, when this was something _Dr. Albert Wily _programmed instead of a system kludged together by random chance and accumulated beta testing. "He'll be able to get up and take orders almost immediately, but he won't be the sharpest tool in the shed. Far behind Blues, I mean: the analysis capability in your programming for Blues is going to be directed to dealing with his own mind first before it has capacity left over for the outside world."

Thomas nodded. "So I'll need to remember that although he looks like a grown man, for now his ability to function is on the level of an advanced computer." When computers needed very specific instructions and couldn't come up with plans to handle things that weren't in their instructions on their own. "Outside of very narrow criteria that I hope won't come up?"

"Until his system has fully adapted my translation program, it will take him awhile to translate orders and compile them into actions," Dr. Wily added. "So give him the full set of instructions in advance, instead of step-by-step as he goes through a process."

"Right, the limits of human short-term memory won't be a factor," Dr. Light agreed, "but I wouldn't give him any too-long list of instructions until he's freed up enough initiative to abort process if necessary." And the judgment and background information necessary to know when to abort process, when an order needed to be disobeyed.

Well, Blues' programming was constructed from the ground up to help robots learn to care, so that they could help others, could make the right decisions?

Albert nodded. "He won't be stupid: I've given him too much processing power for that – oh, by the way, I came up with another chip design – but I'm dealing with a non-human mental architecture here. Until he learns how to handle our languages and idioms, our assumptions – we'll be expecting him to be smart instead of just follow orders exactly - and all the other things he'll have to translate, the lag will make him slow. He'd be able to respond instantly if someone points a gun at him, once he knows what a gun is, but if he's in a complex non-violent situation, he won't be able to analyze all the data necessary to come up with a creative solution until the window of opportunity to actually use that solution is probably long-closed."

Thomas nodded slowly. Blues was inclined to try things to see what happened, but that was partially because Thomas didn't give him too many new things he had to understand in order to understand what he was doing at once. Shadow was going to be _flooded _with new things he had to make sense of before he could make _any _sense whatsoever out of the experimental data obtained by doing things to see what happened. Out of the solutions suggested by experience, out if imagination and initiative.

When he thought of how Shadow would act, would _have _to act, without any ability to analyze and imagine outside of what his creators _let _him understand? Criminal negligence. Especially in war, with people's lives on the line! People _would _die who would have lived if that species (or to be fair, he reminded himself, Shadow could have been built by one specific country, he didn't represent his species of origin as a whole) gave them the tools of understanding needed to save lives.

"Part of why I knew you had the right idea," Albert said, watching him. "Unfortunately for him, I don't have any patience with slow people. You'll have to keep me from yelling at him while he's trying to think. His old programming will abort his thought process to check to see if there are any orders in what I'm saying and then he'll have to start what he was working on over again."

Thomas nodded. "Keeping him in the lab with Blues would give him practice listening to us and understanding what we're saying without too much need to do the next step and translate our orders into actions."

Physical actions would be easier than conversation for _any _system: there were orders of magnitude fewer variables involved. With a human, Thomas would have to wonder if Shadow would be alright with following orders, but if he was constructed as a military unit with that little free will, then it might help for him to have a simple chain of command to deal with, and simple orders that he was competent to fulfill while he was rebooting and adjusting.

Still, Thomas didn't like the idea of giving him make-work, and helping around the house would have to be scheduled around the maid. There was cleaning the lab, but that involved entire _lists _of special-case information for the maid, so she didn't have to worry about cleaning up something that was still in-use or damaging equipment with special care instructions that even someone who used to work at other labs wouldn't know about because it was Albert's work.

Maybe Shadow would have some ideas, once he had settled in a bit.

Of _course _Albert had his own ideas.

* * *

"Can you hear me?" Albert said first.

"Audio systems functional," Shadow said, instead of a yes, as black eyes opened.

Thomas might have wondered at that, but Shadow was military unit programmed to give status reports instead a _person _used to being asked if they were okay.

"And you can understand what I'm saying," Albert said next.

Shadow didn't answer: it wasn't a question. He was probably used to having people talk about him like he wasn't there.

"Classify the 'body language' files as relevant to combat techniques and order comprehension," Albert ordered. He looked contemptuous, but not disappointed: he'd expected that Shadow's creators would only have given him a narrow communication channel, one for orders? But wait, body language and other non-verbal cues were important to reading hostile intent: as a martial artist, Dr. Light knew that well. Had this alien race _really _chosen not to give their units the latitude to read the signs around them and determine how likely people were to launch an attack?

"Yes, Sir," Shadow said after a second. "Additional language files loaded."

"And you can understand what I'm saying," Albert repeated himself, and nodded when Shadow's response was a nod. "Stand up."

Shadow did so, without a yes sir. So movement orders were silently obeyed…

"I'm Dr. Albert Wily – you can call me Dr. Wily. I built that body. This is Dr. Thomas Light – obey his orders when they're not in conflict with mine. If you receive conflicting orders, tell whichever one of us gave them to you. Now that you're activated, we're going to test your movement programming and physical reaction speed by playing a game called ping-pong, and then Thomas has some mental function tests for you. Follow me," Albert said, and Thomas got out of the way, watching the alien follow after him. Only the first step was careful, after that the movement seemed fairly natural.

Dr. Light had to cover a laugh, because of _course _once Albert got a robot capable of playing table tennis he was going to take advantage of that function.

Come to think of it, perhaps he could see if he could use Shadow as a sparring partner? That would certainly test out his precision movement, and if Dr. Light classified meditation as part of combat training? It might help Shadow sort things out.

* * *

"He doesn't seem to remember _anything_," Thomas said sadly. At least there was something left in Shadow's body, the movement programming proved that, but was his personality gone? Was the person who lived in that body really dead? If Albert was right about fusion (and if Thomas was right about this part of it) then someone _was _alive in there up until they installed the Blues-derived programming, at least. So what if starting up foreign programming in systems connected to the alien robot had killed him? Some kind of security measure?

"The memory files are there, he just can't access them." Albert scowled. "It's better than constantly wiping them, or a long list of nasty alternative ways of lobotomizing AI… They probably picked this method because this way their units could benefit from combat experience – if they lasted that long – and use accumulated data as a substitute for imagination. I decided to activate him now instead of waiting until I'd hacked into those files for a reason. Let's expose Shadow's new programming – your caring about people programming – to you for awhile before he has to deal with how his old owners used to treat him. The second to last thing we need is for him to decide to hate all organic life."

The two immediate questions were 'what would the last thing we need be?' and 'like you consider me an exception to your general contempt for people?' but they'd left Shadow in the lab with Blues in full _new person_ mode, and Thomas needed to get back in there to be adult supervision.

* * *

The first hurdle in Shadow's relationship with Blues was that Blues wanted people to interact with him, and while Shadow could ignore him and stand guard, when Thomas was about to ask him to respond to Blues' actions and interact with him, the question was how? Do what together?

Blues needed social development, and Shadow might not be up to social interaction for awhile, even interacting with a fairly simple young robotic intelligence. So what _could _Shadow do that would make Blues happy, Thomas wondered, and looked at Shadow, thinking about the robot's capabilities.

About the specs on his arms. "Would you please pick Blues up and follow me?" he asked. "We'll go to the new exercise room."

The tatami mats in Thomas' original exercise room really weren't up to the strain of a robot of Shadow's weight maneuvering quickly. Fortunately, this house was built from the ground up and came with high-security storage space, including one large room with a concrete floor. Thomas had moved his meditation mat and a few other things into this room and Shadow could wear his gis provided he didn't duplicate the movements involved when Thomas tied his own belt exactly. The degree of baggyness that resulted when Shadow attempted that was rather embarrassing, but he'd shown Shadow how to tie the practice robe. Thomas wasn't certain, but Shadow's emotional display programming came from what _he'd _put together in hopes that Blues would want to use it someday, and that might have been a bit of interest in his eyes, in addition to the embarrassment of realizing he'd done it wrong the first time.

"Put him in the corner there," Dr. Light instructed him, "and why don't you work on meditation for a bit while I warm up?"


	4. Shifting Futures

"Oh dear," Thomas said, coming back into the lab carrying a stack of papers and journals that had been sent to him priority mail. "It's my fault. That last chip design I had patented for you: I should have realized that it had such an incremental," for Albert, "increase in computing power that you must have been working on improving something else."

"That design's for mass production," Albert confirmed. "Eventually you want to have how many robot masters, with how many robots each? I might hand-make my personal chips so I have the best tech possible for me and my projects," like Blues, even if he was also Thomas' project, "but I'm not going to waste my time making that many. That was the first trial run for a design that could stand up to terrible quality control."

"You just jumped the computing power available to everyone who can't afford near-custom chips by over a decade. And the lower waste heat… I think I'm going to need to start selling low-level robots."

"Your low-level robotics programs will be better than everyone else's."

"It feels extremely unethical. I'll be strangling competition and making myself quite a lot of money," Dr. Light said, and sighed.

"Do you _want _other people who don't have your principles to get the chance to beta-test cheap robot programming on a grand scale? Do you want a Paperclip Maximizer?" Dr. Wily asked.

Dr. Light paused. Put down the stack of papers. "You knew this would happen."

"There is _no one _out there capable of programming a robot in the same _league _as ours. For now, anyway. The longer you wait, the greater the chance some prodigy without your scruples or vision will show up and figure out how to program something that _doesn't _look like scrap metal compared to your work. Until robot masters are ready, your work _needs _to be the unquestioned standard everyone else's work is built on."

"Unquestioned?" Thomas' eyebrows rose. _Albert _recommending that something be _unquestioned_?

"Unquestioned by idiots. The kind of people who make stupid mistakes like giving AI orders that can only be carried out by exterminating the human race?" Albert reminded him. "The kind of people who just do what's easiest instead of _thinking _about technology and the future. If idiots are going to be using a template, it needs to be yours, or you know exactly what will happen."

"Idiotproof." Thomas sighed, because no such thing.

"The universe produces bigger idiots," Albert agreed. "You're the one who wants to save the human race."

"This advances the timetable. I don't know if Blues is going to be ready by the time things get to the point that we _need _robot masters to keep unintelligent robots _with my programming _from being used for war. You shortened the timetable on the _danger_, without shortening it on the safety…" Thomas' eyes narrowed. "Exactly what do you have planned for Blues, Albert?" Without consulting me?

"I don't have anything planned. I'm just pretty sure, knowing you, that making a friend will be good for Blues."

"Albert…" Thomas touched his forehead, took a breath. "Please don't play these games with me. I know that you… I probably would have agreed with you, if you'd explained. You _let me worry about my son, _Albert." And the world, but in Albert's opinion worrying about the world was just asking for it.

There was a pause: was Albert really going to say it? Finally he sighed, and the "Sorry," was flippant. Seeming, at least, but the fact he even said it?

"The next time you come up with a plan? Don't just assume I'm going to disappoint you." By saying no, by not seeing its brilliance. "I realize that I have enough money to qualify as 'the man,' heaven help me, but just… setting me up to do something, without even bothering to try to explain?" 'Taking advantage of something I'm doing for you,' he could have said, but Albert hadn't asked him to do it and therefore hadn't agreed to feel obligated to _not _turn the schematics he gave Thomas into booby-traps. Pranks. Pranks that could _get people killed_, if warbots were deployed before there were robot masters to make them stand down.

Albert groaned. "Don't give me that look. Alright, alright, I'll at least _try _to explain any of my plans that affect your son."

"That's all I'm asking," Dr. Light said, relieved. "I'm an adult and I know you, so I should expect you to surprise me, but Blues is still a very young _child, _Albert. What if he blamed himself for not being ready soon enough to shut down WWIII, what if…"

That prompted a wince. "What if he takes after you," Dr. Wily acknowledged. "Point taken."

* * *

"Still?" he asked, looking out a window at a courtyard garden (an actual exterior window would be too dangerous, but technology marched on and Dr. Wily could certainly find a way to spy on this lab if Dr. Wily wasn't the one running security), sounding more bored than he was.

"You should be more excited!"

"Right, right, fall of the Berlin Wall, the idiots are less likely to kill us all with one moment of typical idiocy. Hooray, the world is saved." Albert rolled his eyes. "Have fun with your parties and humanitarian things, just come visit your robot before he gets lonely." He hung up.

"Should I tell him?" Albert wondered aloud, glancing over at Blues. "No. Let him think this makes you safer. I suppose radioactive fallout would kill you just as dead as us – I should work on that – but even if the Cold War really is over, that's just going to make them want robot soldiers even more. Soldiers that no one cares about, to send to kill each other in countries that no one cares about, only the resources they possess, and the people at home won't have to care either when no matter how much the war escalates, because they're no longer in danger of having nukes dropped on their white picket fences."

He shook his head, eyes narrowed. "Too many bureaucrats are going to have to justify their continued paychecks. The military-industrial complex is going to have to find _something_ to spend money on. The paradigm has changed, and that means chickens running around with their heads cut off, but it's when they've gotten their act together and the machine is focused again that it will have the strength to crush Thomas under to get to you, no matter _how _respected and well-liked he's managed to make himself. They'll have their robot armies to gun people down and bomb them without pity one way or another. Thomas is hoping you can make that impractical just by existing and being able to steal their robots out from under their control." Albert snorted. "They'll try to wipe you out first, so they can get on with wiping humanity out. At least the increase in networking technology will give you more power and access… Yes," he realized, starting to smile. "I should get involved there. It wouldn't do for them to have security systems that could keep either of us out, and I can get behind technology that allows me to get work done without having to actually talk to people." Ugh.

"Thomas is the one who thinks he can save the world, but I suppose I could do it a favor by reducing the amount people have to talk to each other. Who knows, I might even save the world. I know not having to talk to stupid people on a regular basis has made _me _much less likely to blow it up."

* * *

_Interesting… It's fun to toss a nail in there and see what happens._

_The EXE AU has Dr. Light being the one focused on network technology, while Dr. Wily wanted robots. One could say that the cleft point for The Protomen is that Dr. Light doesn't actually think through the inevitable results of creating robots that are perfectly obedient to humans ('hands of steel'). _

_I can just see Dr. Wily inventing a lot of communications tech and then being beyond furious when people actually use it to communicate – the complaint that cellphones and text-messaging mean that people are now obligated to be available to other people who want to bother them 24/7, with immediate replies required or drama happens. There was this science fiction story where teleportation tech causes a massive rise in the murder rate, as people are now far less able to get away from the people that are determined to drive them up the wall..._


End file.
